Quotes

12 February 2016

"Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." --Voltaire

You should demand high moral standards of yourself.

In theory, the reason we’re so nice to soldiers, that we have customs around honoring and thanking them, is that they’re supposed to be sacrificing themselves for the good of the people. In the case of the NSA, this has been reversed. Our wellbeing is sacrificed to make their job of monitoring the world easier. When this is part of the culture of power, it is well on its way to being capable of any abuse. --Quinn Norton

The NSA has made computer security even worse than it already is, for everybody, so that it can ingest, analyze, and forever store what everyone is thinking, saying, and reading at all times... because 1 in every ~100,000 people might become a terrorist at some point.

Of course this presupposes that when the intelligence community actually knows about an impending threat, they are capable of doing something about it, even though again and again, whether we're talking about the Boston Bombing or even 9/11, we could have done a LOT more with the information we had, in some cases easily preventing such attacks in the first place (by detaining and investigating the one Boston bomber that Russian intelligence told us about long before the bombing occurred).

Yes, that's right -- it's not that we didn't have enough information, but that we didn't use the information we had.

This is one reason why Snowden is opposed to mass surveillance -- it gives the NSA et al a haystack to search through, yes, but what we need is not more information, but smarter ways of using the information we already have. Mass surveillance makes this problem worse, not better, which is why Snowden says these programs make us less safe.